Sally Jane’s background and interests are in live performance, art & technology, and interdisciplinary research. She funded her Doctorat d'état (Institut d’études théâtrales, Paris III) by working as a scientific translator. After authoring studies on new media for UNESCO and the French Ministry of Culture, and leading a major digital images conference at the Louvre, she worked on EU Framework projects at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe. In parallel, she developed performance technology initiatives as research director of the International Institute of Puppetry in Charleville-Mézières and artistic co-director of the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam. As Director General of the Ecole supérieure de l'image (Angoulême/ Poitiers), she subsequently secured a multi-million euro funding contract and launched a practice-based Digital Arts PhD with Poitiers University. Since autumn 04, as founding director of Culture Lab, a £4M SRIFfunded interdisciplinary digital laboratory working with Newcastle’s three faculties (Humanities, Science, Medicine), her role is to seed and host a wide range of interdisciplinary research projects.

Member of the AHRC Knowledge Transfer Peer Review Panel, she lead Newcastle input to an FP6 EU creative software project, is Co-Investigator on an ESRC project on sustainable business models in the creative industries, and was Principal Investigator on an EPSRC-AHRC e-science pilot (performing arts, bioengineering, computing). Funding and research bodies for which she has ensured consultancy include the Swedish Strategic Research Foundation, Hexagram, Daniel Langlois Foundation and Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société in Canada, Telefonica Foundation in Madrid, Netherlands Quality Agency (post-graduate arts programmes), and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. As a stubborn believer in the power of collaborative, interdisciplinary energies to spearhead innovative cultural and technological processes, she tends to naturally work in unclassifiable discomfort zones.

Website: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/culturelab/people/profile/s.j.norman

Email: s.j.norman AT newcastle.ac.uk